There was an interview with Lord Beeching from the 1980s shown just prior to Hislop's film. He came across as a very cool customer who could answer every question. He brought to mind his 1980s equivalent from Mrs Thatcher's era, Ian McGregor, the elderly American invited in to oversee the decimation of our coal industry. Patriotic? I don't think so

No doubt improvements could be made to the railways but at the end of the day, the Beeching report was a triumph for the bean-counters, not the country.

Closing lines might be a sure fire way of solving your problem but it didn't make the railways pay.

One surprising fact revealed was that Beeching didn't approve of electrification, regarding its construction as disruptive. A somewhat odd reason for not making an innovation in any industry. You can't help but feel Beeching was sent in to run down what was regarded as an anachronism. He was a hitman.

Beeching should have been fighting the railways' corner instead, his actions were a heaven-sent gift to the road lobby. It was rather like putting a logger in charge of a rain forest conservation project.

Beeching said he wanted the railways to 'build on their strength'. Today millions of tons of goods thunder (or crawl) along our motorways and roads in thousands of hazardous lorries. What went wrong there Mr Beeching?

There was also a great deal of needless (and heedless) waste at this time. In 1957, there were 20,000 steam engines on BR. By January 1968 this had dropped to little over 300. There were many sophisticated, reliable and powerful engines such as the 9F class (Evening Star etc), which had only been built in the late 1950s. They only saw a few years of service, yet there were years of life left in them.

The Beeching report chimed with the spirit of the era; change for change's sake. It was a testament to the penny-pinching lack of vision and foresight, the consequence of which we are still feeling today.

J Roberts, Wakefield